I don't get a choice of resolution - only DNxHD 145 is available. Is there somewhere else to adjust this? As the mixdown is only used for DVD output, I don't mind losing some quality at this stage if it will speed things up. At the moment, the mixdown stalls at about 1:40 in the sequence. No crash or errors, just stuck at 79%, but I am able to cancel out just fine. I am going to try to mixdown from just before the stuck point, and view the mixdown debug in the console... Anything else I can try?

Ok, let's back up. Are you burning an HD-DVD or is this a standard def DVD? With that large a sequence, you may be running into a file size limit on your drives. Again, with just this little bit of info, it's hard to tell so that's just a guess.

Ok, sorry, some more info. I'm burning a SD DVD from HDV sources. I have successfully done a mixdown for the first ~55 mins of the sequence to create a 62Gb file. I have 84Gb free space now, and tried to create a second mixdown for the next ~35 mins of the sequence, but it stalled at 79% (left overnight, tried again, stalled at same point). I went to around the 79% point in the marked section of the sequence and tried another mixdown for a small section around that point, which worked fine. I am now trying another mixdown to just before where it stalled, with mixdowndebug enabled. So far, no errors. I will then continue from that point and see if it stalls again. I'm watching disk space, but there's no sign of low disk or memory issues.

Is mixdown still required for DV sources to get around long GOPs? If not, maybe I'll just recapture in DV using the camera to transcode from HDV, then avoid the mixdown issue. The amount of editing is minimal, except for dealing with numerous timecode dropouts.

thanks

Well, Burning HD to SD DVD is still new to me too but, I am not sure that DVDit will author an HD output to an SD DVD. If it does, my apologies but, the one time I did it, I had to mix down to 1:1 SD first and THEN DVDit was happy with the QT file. Again, not having a ton of time in this water, I may have been doing something wrong....

 Hello, Swrightsls

Sorry I didn't jump in sooner.

After my initial experimentation with MC and Blu-Ray I made a tutorial on my workflow.

The tutorial is HERE.

On page 9, left-hand panel, last sentence are the words "A menu will appear where you can choose "DVD" or "Blu-Ray"
If you choose "DVD" at this point DVDitPro will do the appropriate transcoding needed.
Likewise, on page 7, you can set the parameters for your output to DVD (as well as Blu-Ray)

Hope this is of help to you.

Regards,
Douglas

Douglas,

Swrightsis is Burning to SD DVD. Would that be any different in DVDit?

 BLKDOG,

I am not ashamed to admit I always get confused by the jungle of abbreviations in the technical world. HD,HDV,SD,MD,XCDM,VBDY, etc.  (I added a few from fantasy )

So let me make sure I have understood the situation.
In my tutorial we are talking basically about MC to Blu-Ray (which is a High Definition workflow)

Swrightsls wants to produce a standard definition DVD. If I have grasped the situation correctly, then there would be no difference in DVDitPro.

If Swrightsls is working in SD and wants to output to a SD-DVD, or even if he/she is working in HD/HDV and wants to output to a SD-DVD - the workflow is the same UNTIL the "output" from DVDitPro stage.
At the point you are offered the choice of outputting to DVD or Blu-Ray.
DVDitPro takes care of the transcoding needed.

I don't know if I have answered your question, or if I have missed the point in the Abbreviation Jungle.

Regards,

Douglas

Perfect Douglas, thank you. The last time I exported a High Def QT from Avid and tried to burn it in DVDit, I had a green screen on the bottom half of my encode and the rest of my program squished in the top.

Maybe it was a different problem.

Actually, I read your guide already Douglas - I've spent much time reading this forum lately! :-)

I'm using DVDit (not pro), so DVD is the only option. I just finished burning a 2 minute test of my project to DVD, and it worked fairly well, although the transcode took a LONG time, probably 20 minutes. The aspect ratio is off though... I suspect this is something to do with the 1080i HDV 1440x1080 source being transcoded to 16:9 letterbox on the DVD. It's close, but it looks like those non-square 1440x1080 pixels are being squished to 720x540, *then* letterboxed. I'm not sure where to look for the setting to fix this. I assume it must be in DVDit, since the transcode is done there using a QT ref file from MC.

I fixed my aspect ratio problem - telling DVDit to use 4:3 did the trick. I also did a test transcode at 3100kbps CBR, which is what a calculator said I would need to fit 128 mins on a DVD5, but it looked pretty awful. Even the 6900kbps transcode to fit it on a DVD9 looks poor compared to the HD source. I also noticed DVDit doesn't use the program temp folder settings for transcode - it creates a temp opendvd folder in the system temp folder location. Something to consider if you have many drives with different speed/capacity. I've added two more 160Gb drives striped, and I will try using these for the final transcoding - maybe it will speed things up a little. Thanks for everyone's help, I think this project is nearly done.

But I am considering a blu-ray burner just to have an HD archive of this material, so that will open another can of worms I'm sure... :-)